How hard is middle English to learn? How much am I going to have

Get an annotated edition and you'll be fine lad.

Chaucer is relatively easy. His writing is more direct and easy to follow than Shakespeare despite all the weird-ass spellings. If you've got annotations to explain the various archaisms that pop up, you should be good. The prologue is probably the hardest part but after a while you get used to the Middle English.

It's just the matter of annoyingly working out the phonetics til you get the word. It's not worth it at all, a conversion into modern spelling would render it literally identical minus all the annoyance.

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I think you'd prefer the sound of Middle English, even if it's harder, it qualifies as music.

So which edition should one go with? A lot of the easily available editions are "translated to modern english" editions.

you can start reading chaucer right now.

http://www.librarius.com/canttran/knighttrfs.htm

in general, it and even old english are easier for a native english speaker to learn than any foreign language. the big issue is the complete lack of modern material, which means you'd need to be borderline autistic to immerse yourself to the extent required to reach 'fluency' (in so far as such a concept is possible with an extinct language/dialect).

>>7594992
>r/books

It doesn't have the same effect in modern English you pleb. You know where to go.

>>7594997
Rivers Chaucer isn't too expensive, isn't translated, had all his works, and has good extra material.

>>7595007
Chaucer isn't old English.

>>7594992
Get out lad.

>>7594997
Get the Riverside. It is the canonical version.

>>7595059
he didn't say it was

>>7594977
It's significantly easier than actually finding an unabridged version of the Canterbury Tales.

>>7595087
Fuck off nerd